‘Che cos’è la sua data di nascita?’ I turn my head sideways on the blood-soaked pillow. ‘9.5.34.’ Expressionless, the doctor in the Pronto Soccorso writes it...
It was all done with a pastry board and a bulldog clip. Sheets of paper were clipped to the board, the board rested on the arms of his chair and the fountain-pen began to cover the pages with a...
Here, in six hundred double-column pages, we have what the editor describes as ‘the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T.S. Eliot’s work as it appeared’....
The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho’s fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think...
I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual...
Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about...
It’s a century and a quarter since J.A. Froude’s Life of Carlyle and his edition of Carlyle’s Reminiscences, a hundred years since Alexander Carlyle’s New Letters and...
Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families....
Let me establish my credentials. On page 320, Bill Clinton recalls a happy time in Montana in 1985 watching ‘marmosets scramble around above the snow line’ (he means marmots). And on...
‘Que se rompe la cuerda’ (‘Let the rope break’), ‘Los Desastres’ plate 77. Robert Hughes has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he...
The most lasting memorial to the Emperor Nero is the Colosseum, even if that was not the intention. In fact, the new Flavian dynasty which took control of Rome in AD 69 erected this vast pleasure...
Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer who feared nothing on earth so much as boredom, and hated the ‘kitchen of life’, was enamoured of a different drudgery –...
Ilya Ehrenburg had a complaint about his friend Pablo Neruda’s work. ‘Too much root,’ he said. ‘Too many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this...
They were both eight-year-old grammar-school boys when news began to reach England of the bloody events of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 (news which bolstered moves towards Protestant reform...
Leycester Coltman was British ambassador in Cuba from 1991 to 1994. During these years, the dust jacket on his book claims, ‘he came as close to personal friendship with Castro as any...
There’s a window, 36 hours or so, not even, after travelling by air between places, places where you’ve lived for a long time. When you’ve landed and into the next day, perhaps...
‘Hanratty! The name which has haunted the British criminal justice system for a generation is about to hit the headlines again.’ Paul Foot wrote that in the LRB in December 1997. The...
B.S. Johnson died by his own hand in 1973. He was 40, and the author of seven novels, all of them rather odd in ways that put publishers off because their oddities made them expensive to produce...